Maintaining Your Motivation

Before we can motivate others, we need to achieve and maintain a high level of motivation for ourselves. With so many organizations running lean, I hear about self-motivation problems regularly. It’s hard to stay pumped up when there are so many demands being placed on us and when others around us are not particularly motivated. But staying motivated raises our value to the organization, something we always want to be mindful of. There are three steps that can help you develop your motivation: display a strong work commitment, strive for results, and develop yourself. Let’s look at ways to display a strong commitment to our work and consider trying just one of these.

Begin by knowing your priorities. Consider your values, goals and priorities for life and work. There are many tools and books available today to help you narrow this down. One I’m reading now is Ask Yourself This by Wendy Craig-Purcell. Discuss and validate your ideas with your family and others close to you. Consider how you spend your time relative to your stated priorities, determine if some adjustments need to be made, and develop a plan to make the needed adjustments. It’s too difficult to maintain our motivation when we’re not doing the things that matter the most to us.

Next is to set high personal standards. Identify your most important responsibilities at work and define superior performance for yourself. Set standards for yourself in each area. What aspects of the job are most important? Timeliness, quality, responsiveness, integrity, relationship building? Monitor your accomplishments and be sure to reward yourself when you meet your standard. Re-evaluate your standards and accomplishments every six months. This step is really important if performance appraisals are not done at your job or if you’re self employed.

Can you make your work more interesting? Identify your most routine tasks and look for ways to do them more efficiently or at least differently. Consider delegating more tasks to develop others and to enable you to take on new tasks. (This is something to consider at home, too!) Review and update your job description, suggesting new responsibilities for yourself that would be interesting to you and also benefit your employer. Perhaps you could swap tasks with a coworker, giving you each a fresh challenge.

Finally, commit to your organization. Be intentional in that commitment to your organization and reinforce it in difficult times. Pay attention to your thoughts, conversations, and actions. Do they reflect your commitment? Support your co-workers, employees, leaders, and customers daily. That support will come back to you in positive ways that will enhance your motivation.